Alfred Tennyson. Andrew Lang

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СКАЧАТЬ readers, so great a change in taste had been wrought by the sixteen years of Waverley romances. The slim volume of Tennyson was naturally neglected, though Leigh Hunt reviewed it in the Tatler. Hallam’s comments in the Englishman’s Magazine, though enthusiastic (as was right and natural), were judicious. “The author imitates no one.” Coleridge did not read all the book, but noted “things of a good deal of beauty. The misfortune is that he has begun to write verses without very well understanding what metre is.” As Tennyson said in 1890, “So I, an old man, who get a poem or poems every day, might cast a casual glance at a book, and seeing something which I could not scan or understand, might possibly decide against the book without further consideration.” As a rule, the said books are worthless. The number of versifiers makes it hard, indeed, for the poet to win recognition. One little new book of rhyme is so like another, and almost all are of so little interest!

      The rare book that differs from the rest has a bizarrerie with its originality, and in the poems of 1830 there was, assuredly, more than enough of the bizarre. There were no hyphens in the double epithets, and words like “tendriltwine” seemed provokingly affected. A kind of lusciousness, like that of Keats when under the influence of Leigh Hunt, may here and there be observed. Such faults as these catch the indifferent eye when a new book is first opened, and the volume of 1830 was probably condemned by almost every reader of the previous generation who deigned to afford it a glance. Out of fifty-six pieces only twenty-three were reprinted in the two volumes of 1842, which won for Tennyson the general recognition of the world of letters. Five or six of the pieces then left out were added as Juvenilia in the collected works of 1871, 1872. The whole mass deserves the attention of students of the poet’s development.

      This early volume may be said to contain, in the germ, all the great original qualities of Tennyson, except the humour of his rural studies and the elaboration of his Idylls. For example, in Mariana we first note what may be called his perfection and accomplishment. The very few alterations made later are verbal. The moated grange of Mariana in Measure for Measure, and her mood of desertion and despair, are elaborated by a precision of truth and with a perfection of harmony worthy of Shakespeare himself, and minutely studied from the natural scenes in which the poet was born. If these verses alone survived out of the wreck of Victorian literature, they would demonstrate the greatness of the author as clearly as do the fragments of Sappho. Isabel (a study of the poet’s mother) is almost as remarkable in its stately dignity; while Recollections of the Arabian Nights attest the power of refined luxury in romantic description, and herald the unmatched beauty of The Lotos-Eaters. The Poet, again, is a picture of that which Tennyson himself was to fulfil; and Oriana is a revival of romance, and of the ballad, not limited to the ballad form as in its prototype, Helen of Kirkconnell. Curious and exquisite experiment in metre is indicated in the Leonine Elegiacs, in Claribel, and several other poems. Qualities which were not for long to find public expression, speculative powers brooding, in various moods, on ultimate and insoluble questions, were attested by The Mystic, and Supposed Confessions of a Second-rate Sensitive Mind not in Unity with Itself, an unlucky title of a remarkable performance. “In this, the most agitated of all his poems, we find the soul urging onward

      ‘Thro’ utter dark a full-sail’d skiff,

       Unpiloted i’ the echoing dance

       Of reboant whirlwinds;’

      and to the question, ‘Why not believe, then?’ we have as answer a simile of the sea, which cannot slumber like a mountain tarn, or

      ‘Draw down into his vexed pools

       All that blue heaven which hues and paves’

      the tranquil inland mere.” [16]

      The poet longs for the faith of his infant days and of his mother—

      “Thy mild deep eyes upraised, that knew

       The beauty and repose of faith,

       And the clear spirit shining thro’.”

      That faith is already shaken, and the long struggle for belief has already begun.

      Tennyson, according to Matthew Arnold, was not un esprit puissant. Other and younger critics, who have attained to a cock-certain mood of negation, are apt to blame him because, in fact, he did not finally agree with their opinions. If a man is necessarily a weakling or a hypocrite because, after trying all things, he is not an atheist or a materialist, then the reproach of insincerity or of feebleness of mind must rest upon Tennyson. But it is manifest that, almost in boyhood, he had already faced the ideas which, to one of his character, almost meant despair: he had not kept his eyes closed. To his extremely self-satisfied accusers we might answer, in lines from this earliest volume (The Mystic):—

      “Ye scorn him with an undiscerning scorn;

       Ye cannot read the marvel in his eye,

       The still serene abstraction.”

      He would behold

      “One shadow in the midst of a great light,

       One reflex from eternity on time,

       One mighty countenance of perfect calm,

       Awful with most invariable eyes.”

      His mystic of these boyish years—

      “Often lying broad awake, and yet

       Remaining from the body, and apart

       In intellect and power and will, hath heard

       Time flowing in the middle of the night,

       And all things creeping to a day of doom.”

      In this poem, never republished by the author, is an attempt to express an experience which in later years he more than once endeavoured to set forth in articulate speech, an experience which was destined to colour his finial speculations on ultimate problems of God and of the soul. We shall later have to discuss the opinion of an eminent critic, Mr. Frederic Harrison, that Tennyson’s ideas, theological, evolutionary, and generally speculative, “followed, rather than created, the current ideas of his time.” “The train of thought” (in In Memoriam), writes Mr. Harrison, “is essentially that with which ordinary English readers had been made familiar by F. D. Maurice, Professor Jowett, Dr. Martineau, Ecce Homo, Hypatia.” Of these influences only Maurice, and Maurice only orally, could have reached the author of The Mystic and the Supposed Confessions. Ecce Homo, Hypatia, Mr. Jowett, were all in the bosom of the future when In Memoriam was written. Now, The Mystic and the Supposed Confessions are prior to In Memoriam, earlier than 1830. Yet they already contain the chief speculative tendencies of In Memoriam; the growing doubts caused by evolutionary ideas (then familiar to Tennyson, though not to “ordinary English readers”), the longing for a return to childlike faith, and the mystical experiences which helped Tennyson to recover a faith that abode with him. In these things he was original. Even as an undergraduate he was not following “a train of thought made familiar” by authors who had not yet written a line, and by books which had not yet been published.

      So much, then, of the poet that was to be and of the philosopher existed in the little volume of the undergraduate. In The Mystic we notice a phrase, two words long, which was later to be made familiar, “Daughters of time, divinely tall,” reproduced in the picture of Helen:—

      “A daughter of the Gods, divinely tall,

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